#before I learned all of the racism and antisemitism and just general garbage

[thegaybiochemist]

Fuck jkrowling and her insanely shitty transphobic beliefs, but fuck if the news that the actor who played hagrid died didnt just punch me in the gut.

[dearyallfrommatt]

Never Give A Fascist An Even Break.

 So you’ve probably seen the above floating around Twitter, maybe it’s made its way to Tumblr, I don’t know. In a nutshell, it’s a recording of alt-right butthole Richard Spencer having a full-on meltdown after being escorted away by police from the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, back in 2017 that resulted in the death of activist Heather Heyer.

 What’s particularly interesting about this audio, about a minute in length, is how unambiguously it shows just what Spencer really is and what he champions, especially when he faces any sort of resistance. Apparently, this will come as a shock to some people. I know, right?

 Previously, Spencer had been normalized in the mainstream press like The New York Times as a fresh new kind of hate monger, one that kept his cool and looked sharp doing it, a Nazi you could have a drink with. CNN, the network so loathed by the very people who think Spencer is worth listening to, had him on as a guest as recently as this past July. Even liberal magazine Mother Jones, in a stunning display of poor judgement, referred to him as a “dapper white nationalist”. We have to listen, they said. Marketplace of ideas or something like that, they said. Or maybe it was free speech, I don’t know.

 And of course, everyone has seen him take that well-deserved punch last January that launched a thousand memes, which apparently hurt his delicate feels more than the sock to the jaw. Even so, by October he was speaking at the University of Florida, my alma mater for whatever that’s worth, as the president of the National Policy Institute, a “think tank” based in Arlington, VA. He wasn’t invited by the university, though. Indeed, they denounced Spencer because he’s a fascist douchenozzle and a smelly racist, but being a state university they had to rent him the space and just had to charge students and alumni up to $500,000 for added security. 

 Amusingly enough, this audio was released by former ally and two-bit grifter Milo Yiannopolous. Formerly good buddies, the two had a falling out after Milo went all pro-pedophile, blowing his con and causing American conservatives to abandoned their Gay Best Friend. Milo’s fall from grace has seen him recently begging for money and losing book deals while pissing on his former fanboys.

 Here’s a quote from Spencer’s whine. Trigger Warning: All sorts of racism and antisemitism.

“I win! They fucking lose!” he continued, before railing against Jews and non-whites, whom he said should be subservient to people like himself. “Little fucking kikes, they get ruled by people like me,” he snarled. “Little fucking octoroons! … My ancestors fucking enslaved those fucking pieces of fucking shit! I rule the fucking world! Those pieces of shit get ruled by people like me!” 

 Well... what can you say? Are you really surprised? You shouldn’t be. Though tech-savvy and media smart (supposedly), Spencer and his alt-right are the same foul racists, antisemitic poltroons, and general bigots we’ve seen from the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party and Christian Identity adherents and John Birchers and any manner of human garbage that has infested the American soul since the country started. 

 It should be noted, of course, that this has yet to be independently verified (as of 2 a.m. Monday morning) and, naturally, we shouldn’t believe Milo goofy ass as far as we can throw him. Nevertheless, whoever’s voice that is, that’s what white supremacy says. That’s what Richard Spencer has been espousing since he broke on the scene, even if he said it nicer and calmer  and more controlled manner than that. Well-spoken racist dickbags are still racist dickbags.

 Even though this was released late Sunday evening, so we don’t have the corporate media’s take on this particular egg on their face, wingnuts are already starting to cut their losses. Sleazy wank stain Jack Prosobiec is trying to distance himself and blame everything on Jake Tapper. Well, Bumble Jack, believe you me, there’s plenty of blame to go around, so buckle up. Your time is going to come eventually, I imagine.

 Now, children, what can we learn from all of this? Well, for one, when someone tells you what they are, believe them. If we, as a culture, reject bigotry, white nationalism, white supremacy, antisemitism, general hatred, and all the rest like we say we do, why should we even give cheap rats like Spencer a second look? After the aforementioned suckerpunch, conservatives and not a few liberals wrung their hands and clutched their pearls at the incivility. “Why must we engage in violence,” they mewled. “Can’t we defeat his ideas with discourse and debate?”

 See, here’s the thing: his ideas have already been discredited and discarded, so everything the geek says should be disregarded no matter how sharp his suit is or how friendly is. This may come as a shock to you, fellow honkies, but there is no “debate” with someone who wants to eliminate rights for large segments of the population or, if they’re being honest, just full on eliminate those segments of the population. In the ‘90s, we called Richard Spencer “David Duke”. This ain’t the first rodeo with this sort of clown.

 We owe him no consideration and no debate. Read your Karl Popper, specifically the Paradox of Tolerance, if you need more persuasion. However, after treating these guys as the pitiful butt of jokes and guilt-free villains in video games at best and the outright scum of the Earth at worst, I really can’t understand why it’d behoove us to even bother.

 I know I’m not the only one to say it, but Donald Trump did not bring us Richard Spencer. When it comes to America’s bigotry against historically oppressed groups, he is merely a symptom, not the cause of the disease. Indeed, it could be argued that Richard Spencer - the people who agree with him outright or just those who tacitly allow the sufferance of his ideology - brought us Donald Trump. Way, way too many people were just waiting on someone in “charge” to give them the okay; treating guys like Spencer seriously helped encourage that environment

 The scales should not be falling from our eyes on this one. We really, really should know better. We shouldn’t allow the corporate media to get away with shit like this. We all share a little guilt on this one. Next time, don’t be so easy on complete bastards, okay?

[greylagwriting]

Review: Redlaw, and how NOT to do Fantastic Racism

James Lovegrove is an author whose books I really enjoy — well, at his Sherlock Holmes books. His original stuff, as Redlaw demonstrates, is junk.

The book starts out with a young boy hopping a fence and running from unseen pursuers through a part of the city he's not supposed to be in. Shortly afterwards, we learn this boy is a vampire (called Sunless, with a capital S, in this book), and is running from people who believe him to be a threat. We also learn that Sunless are segregated from human society.

Now, I was really into this concept when I read the first bit of the first chapter, and I would have loved to see a story were vampires were unjustly discriminated against. Sadly, what I actually got was... not good.

Our protagonist is Actually James Redlaw, a tough-talking officer of the Sunless Housing And Something-or-Other called SHADE. Basically, the vampire police. Not as in “police who are vampires”, but “people who police vampires”. He is the tired old gruff cop who never gets along with anybody, and the one partner that could actually stand him was a lady officer who died long before the book began, thanks to Redlaw not being strong enough to protect her or some bull. Despite being talked about so much that I expected her to show up again as a Sunless, lady officer (who I can’t remember the name of) never actually has an impact on the plot, except for the very end.

The actual plot is that half of Parliment (the story is set in London) is trying to eradicate all vampires, as they deem them too dangerous to be among humans, while the other half simply wants to relocate or contain them. The Sunless, I might mention, have absolutely no say in any of this. There is also an organization called PETS; People for the Ethical Treatment of Sunless, a group of young goths that campaign for vampire rights (though they aren’t as bad as the real-life group they’re named after).

Personally, I don’t find it great that humans are campaigning for the rights of vampires, considering that, unlike animals that can’t speak for themselves, they’re sentient and perfectly capable of protesting on their own. Generally, marginalized people are the ones to lead protests for their own rights; humans protesting for vampires is like white people protesting for Civil Rights.

Parliment end up by spiking the cattle blood that they ship in to the Sunless with artificial hormones, making them more violent in order to justify creating Solardome One, a large domed city with an opaque glass roof that all the Sunless are going to be contained in. The dome, however, has the ability to have its opaque roof turned clear, to let in sunlight and incinerate every Sunless. Redlaw catches onto the plan chases down the big bads in time to stop the dome from going opaque, and... literally just leaves all the Sunless inside. He claims to be pro-vampire, but doesn’t spare them a single thought, or even think of asking them, you know, what they want?

The Sunless are discriminated against in this book, because they are inherently dangerous, and can and will kill humans, though most drink cattle blood. I gotta say that this is... not how you do fantasy discrimination.

See, the Sunless are clearly a stand-in for immigrants, particularly ones that are PoC, and the author falls into the pitfall of trying to justify the discrimination.

Sunless are discriminated against because they are undead creatures that leave feces all over their dwelling places, have no regard for their living conditions, and are nearly indistinguishable from feral animals. They drink blood, and often do so from innocent humans, including children, and regularly turn them into Sunless. They are often aggressive, and attack ad kill people who get too close.

Immigrants are discriminated against because they come from countries that are perceived as being “lesser”. 

PoC are discriminated against because their skin tones and physical features are different from white people.

Sunless are seen as deserving of life because they used to be people and didn’t ask to be vampires.

PoC are seen as deserving of life because they’re @#$%ing people that have, as a group, done nothing @#$%ing wrong!

Whenever you do racism allegories in fiction, it is doomed from the very start if you say “X group is oppressed because they did something bad at one point/are all an active danger to others”. Racism isn’t logical. It can’t be justified. It boils down to a group in power going “these people are different from me, so they’re inferior.”

Another thing: the Sunless themselves are perfectly fine with living they way they do. None of them, besides the boy at the start, express distaste with their current situation and, subsequently, do nothing to change it. Rather, it’s the humans who decide what’s best for the Sunless, by which they really mean “what’s best for us”, and that is destroying or corralling them in ghettos (yes, the book does call them ghettos).

The one and only good Sunless is Illyria, who joins Redlaw and helps him combat the Parliment. She’s not just any vampire, mind you, but a shtriga - as smart, strong, and beautiful as a vampire from Twilight, with minor powers of hypnosis over “lesser” Sunless and the self-restraint to not drink from humans. Thankfully, there’s no romantic bull between her and Redlaw.  All the other Sunless, I must note, are treated as little more than barely-sentient animals, and get very few lines. 

Additionally, I want to add that, in addition to the mess above, Redlaw is also rather homphobic and Islamophobic, with a nice dash of antisemitism thrown in. For the Islamophobia, one of the SHADE officers is a Muslim man named Khalid, whom Redlaw openly hates (and the feeling is mutual). Said officer is also misogynistic, with an entire paragraph of the book being about Khalid thinking about how he hates General MacArthur because she wears pants and doesn’t cover her hair, unlike his good Muslim wife. This is stated explicitly and almost word-for-word.

As for the homophobia, it comes in the form of the last few chapters when it’s revealed that MacArthur actually really, REALLY hates the Sunless (which has not been so much as hinted at before this), because they killed the lady officer Redlaw keeps wangsting over. Why? Surprise surprise, MacArthur and the lady officer were in love! Then MacArthur is killed while trying to destroy all the Sunless in Solardome One. So of the two gay characters, one died before the book started, and the other one turns out to be evil (and also gay) at the very end, shortly before dying.

Ugh.

Now. The antisemitism. It comes up only in one line, but the implications of that one line are positively hideous. 

After the proceedings for Solardome One are in effect, the pro-Sunless political figure commits suicide, because, as a Jewish person, he feels as though he’s greenlighted a “Final Solution” for the Sunless. I can’t stress how much that is explicitly stated. The author just compared the Sunless - undead monsters who can and will kill humans at the drop of a hat - to Jewish people, who were killed in the millions for simply existing.

In short, Jewish people are being compared to vampires, which is beyond vile for so, so many ways, and all I can do is link this informative little essay that explains why drawing this comparison is so awful (X).

Now, I’m sure this probably wasn’t intentional on the author’s part, but that does not make it any better. In fact, it might make it worse, because Lovegrove clearly did not consider the implications of comparing Jewish people to bloodsucking monsters!

All in all, Redlaw is garbage. The characters aren’t exceptional, have fewer dimensions than a Mobius strip, and almost of them die anyways (except our tough-cop hero title guy). There’s very little to salvage from this book, though I can think about ways to fix the story and the world. Apparently there’s a sequel to it, but, to quote the old meme, I’ve frankly had enough of that guy.

I give Redlaw a 1 out of 5, for having a vaguely okay premise but flushing it down the toilet.